And after three days of claiming that the blast was caused by fireworks igniting, officials have now finally admitted that ammunition also exploded, but found a convoluted way of explaining it on the official government website Turkmenistan: Golden Age:

It has been established by a government commission that the ignition occurred as a result of hot weather in recent days, which led to a detonation of pyrotechnical goods, and their flight over a significant territory, in the radius of which happened to be an army warehouse, where explosives were stored from ammunition of the Soviet era which were to be recycled.

The official statement also acknowledged damage to buildings.

In an article on chrono-tm.org, an independent emigre site maintained by the Turkmenistan Initiative for Human Rights, the editors said, "Despite the fact that official statistics on the number of deaths have clearly been minimized, it must be acknowledged that this was the first civilized reaction from the Turkmen leadership to the accident in Abadan."